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Video Game Television Shows

This seems the most suitable forum for it, even though I donít recall seeing a video game TV show which catered to PC users. I was a big fan of GamesMaster, and in my opinion there has never been a gaming TV show that rivaled its popularity (or at least in Britain). An odd notion, considering more people are playing video games than ever before.

A reality show based on The Sims in which one contestant is the hand of god and the rest must live their lives in a house as his or her playthings. You'd probably have to outlaw starving and drownings, but forcing urination is ok.

Finland ended up getting a fair few from mid-90s onwards, new ones steadily popping out every few years. Each one seemed to have a curious personality of their own...

Probably the most legendary one was Game Over from the 90s, which has since become somewhat of a cult classic due to it being rather... different from your usual video game shows. For starters, it was hosted by a smooth-talking, cheekily joking, shamelessly flirtatious rubber doll called Vito. Most episodes featured guests who had nothing to do with gaming and who were seemingly picked at random, ranging from famous sports people to pop stars (including the occasional foreign star, like Ricky Martin) to Batman and Robin (whose episode is on youtube for the morbidly curious!). Sometimes these guests had to play certain games using telephone touchpads against people who'd call on the show and who would win a prize if they won the celebrity guests (I think they even had miniature tournaments where they pitted callers against eachother). The show also had an insane obsession with the Philips CD-i console, to the point that I think they sponsored the whole thing. And it had game reviews and news too!

The longest-running games show was Tilt! which was more about the actual games, featuring plenty of news and reviews. And a female model (with cringily terrible English pronunciation) as a host, which I'm sure gave the show its own charm for some... For a long time it was actually a rather good show which back in the days before mass consumer internet was the best source for gameplay footage. The show lasted for quite a long time, but its quality dwindled fairly massively during its final years - they launched a web community of their own, kept on piling features upon features there and the TV show began to resemble an advert for the website rather than a games program. In a closing anecdote, my strongest memory related to the show was their review of the first Hitman game - the narrating review talked about the revolutionary stealth elements and the importance of staying hidden and disguised, while the game footage saw Agent 47 draw a gun out in the streets of the first level and going on a gung-ho massacre shooting down everything that moves.

Probably the highest quality gaming shows came from a cable channel called Moon TV, which seemed to spew out an insane amount of them, including shows dedicated to specific platforms. I didn't have the channel myself so I can't vouch for the content myself, but a lot of Finnish gamers have very warm memories over PC-Peliluola which specialised in PC games; IRC the reason for that being the show's hosts who were rather... quirky but knew their stuff masterfully, creating a great mixture of information and oddball humour.

There was also Blast which was aimed for the little kids market, aired on early mornings after the cartoons. Two kids competed against eachother in popular Playstation games and the winner at the end of the show would go home with a Playstation (or other prizes). A fairly dull show, although I'm sure for the competitors it was fairly awesome. A classmate of mine participated and even ended up winning the Playstation.

And of course, although this has nothing to do with gaming in itself but is a show that featured a specific game as its centerpiece, there's the classic show Hugo where kids controlled a troll character through various stages. The price for the winners? Candy. Many of Hugo's quips and oneliners became big memes. Oh the nostalgic love.

Last edited by Flint; 24-08-2011 at 09:39 PM.

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